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Agreed, it's not just Ubisoft, and it's not just for DRM, and it's not even just games. My GF got pissed at Comcast because when she decided she didn't need both a landline and a cell (she's on SS and rather poor), the cable price didn't go down so she just dropped Comcast.

Her daughter gave her a camera for Xmas last year and it was full, she wanted me to help her put the pictures in the PC. As soon as I turned it on, Norton complained that it needed to download updates. These days why do you even need AV without a net connection? The AV insisted on a net connection.

I plugged the camera in and Kodak demanded an internet connection to download its software. It didn't even need the damned software! after killing some processes, Windows happily downloaded the pictures from the camera.

People need to understand that a computer isn't a phone and has a lot of uses besides just surfing the web. We used computers without a net connection for decades. There is no reason whatever, from a customer point of view, for all these damned companies to demand an internet connection for a device or program like an AV or a camera or a single player game.

I pulled out my phone and emailed complaints to the damned companies, not that it will do any good.

If a single player game won't work without the internet, PLEASE don't buy it!

Linux is better than windows for most things. The two things Windows is best for is high-end games and getting infected, it beats any other OS for those uses. If I was still into gaming I'd have a dual boot machine, but since I rarely play PC games any more I don't even have a Windows computer.

Worst of all is that recent cameras seem to be going back to the late '90s method of using a proprietary transfer method that requires a special application. What's wrong with USB Mass Storage mode? None of the recent consumer cams have it.

What was especially stupid with her Kodak is that it does use the USB mass storage mode* but still wanted to download its own proprietary program. I'd guess that's why many are moving back to the pre-USB methods.

I can't figure out why companies want to make things harder for their customers. Are they stupid or what?

Worst of all is that recent cameras seem to be going back to the late '90s method of using a proprietary transfer method that requires a special application. What's wrong with USB Mass Storage mode? None of the recent consumer cams have it.

How many of these cameras store their pictures some kind of removable SD card...

Ugh, that's terrible. I've always hated camera picture downloading software. But I have no idea of current trends, having switched long ago to using a dedicated card reader only. I found a nice little one that sits in the 3.5" bay, but there are plenty of removable USB ones. I recommend them to anyone hating their camera software.

I couldn't help but laugh when I saw "why do you even need AV without a net connection... so anyway, I continued to connect the camera with its rewritable disk space to my machine that still has autorun enabled..."
*facepalm*

It's not mine, it's hers, and I've given up trying to get her to keep her kids from doing stupid shit on her computer (her last computer got so bad I had to wipe the drive and install Linux). In this case autorun wasn't enabled, the Windows dialog that says "what do you want to do" came up. The comment was too long as it was, I left steps out for brevity (or at least least less lengthy).

My phone's not very smart (it would have been a smartphone a few years ago since it has a qwerty keyboard), but it's my primary camera. It takes better pictures than a $1000 digital camera did fifteen years ago, and a lot better pictures than the old cheap analog cameras.

It would be nice if Windows knew what was being plugged into its USB port. Linux seems to know. As soon as I plug the little bluetooth dongle in, kbluetooth runs. As soon as I plug a thumb drive in, the file manager recognizes it. The OS sh

The antivirus company does not know that you will never hook your computer up to the net, and that you will only plug in to the computer cameras which you have independently virus scanned (you did know that viruses have been payloads on factory-bought storage media before right?) on some other computer.

The antivirus maker figures you'll be on the net. Or at minimum will be sticking thumb drives and non-scanned DVD's (they've been virus vectors in the past too) and cameras in your computer, and therefore wil

Indeed, I was going to get this on Steam, but that's just completely unacceptable. No sale.

You complain about Ubisoft but would happily accept pretty much the same restrictions from Valve. That's supposed to be irony, right?

I'd say it's a legitimate decision. The defining difference between Ubisoft's DRM and Valve's is that Steam doesn't screw up your single player game if your connection drops out. For many people, Steam makes a pretty good case.

Most people, myself included, think Steam is a reasonable compromise. There's DRM, but it's pretty consumer friendly. Once the game is activated the first time it works fine without an Internet connection (or if Steam drops off the face of the Earth tomorrow). Since typically you're activating the game right after you just downloaded and installed it, chances of you not having a 'Net connection aren't high. It's not perfect, the chance exists that some time in the future you might want to reinstall a St

Comparing steam's DRM with Ubisoft's is about as accurate as this comparison: "You complain about the backscatter rays and having yourself and your child to be groped randomly from TSA, but you were OK with the metal detectors, that's supposed to be irony right?"

In general steams DRM does little to actually harm you from playing the game, you can play it from multiple different PCs, on a laptop riding a bus etc... It even gives you some benefits over other methods (the ability to download the game on a PC

Unless you don't always have an Internet connection. I mean really, this is a much more ridiculous requirement than Steam (which just uses the Internet to download and activate your game). If I have a laptop, obviously I have an Internet connection at home to download, install and activate the game... Will I have one at the hotel? Sometimes, not always, and often not free. The Airport while I'm waiting for a flight? Sometimes, but again not always, and often not free. The airplane? Sometimes, but neve

They just don't learn. Who at Ubisoft was so stupid that they forgot the reaction last time they did this? And wouldn't that idiot's decision have to go through some other people? This is irresponsible from both a PR and a revenue point of view.

But the severity of the reaction will diminish each time they pull this stunt. By the 5th or 6th iteration it's likely to be such a subdued reaction that they'll get away with it completely. It seems to be human nature that each time we are outraged by something, the impact each time it happens slowly diminishes until we accept it as part of life.

But the severity of the reaction will diminish each time they pull this stunt. By the 5th or 6th iteration it's likely to be such a subdued reaction that they'll get away with it completely. It seems to be human nature that each time we are outraged by something, the impact each time it happens slowly diminishes until we accept it as part of life.

This is another reason on top of consilitis why I just stopped buying PC games. I used to buy them all the time.

What steams me is that now developers complain that the PC game market is "weak" and "fractured" when they don't even understand it's their own damn fault.

What is true, however, is that in politics and PR, there is a very common trick: Announce some plan so out there that protest is guaranteed. Wait for the protest and check how widespread and loud it is. Then adjust the real thing that you had planned all along to be just under your estimated protest threshold and release it as the "compromise solution".

In most cases, you will get more than if you had gone for the real thing right away, and with less protest, as people think

I remember when steam first came along and that despite the negative reaction valve largely got away with it (presumablly beause peoples desire to play the games was greater than their being pissed off at what they had to accept to play them) and most of the other vendors followed with their own online activation schemes (some of which were more draconian than steam some liess).

I strongly HOPE the same doesn't happen with always online play but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Already we see starcraft 2 w

If you think about it, it is difficult to believe any manager with enough power to make this kind of choices is a somewhat retarded guy which can't see even immediate consequences for his decisions.

IMHO the objective is to make people accept the always connected slav... er.. lifestyle. A company gets damages because of that policy? well, what's a company? a name on some assets owned by the same banks that own the competitors' ones. Under control of the same class of PHBs which went to the same schools, got

They just don't learn. Who at Ubisoft was so stupid that they forgot the reaction last time they did this? And wouldn't that idiot's decision have to go through some other people? This is irresponsible from both a PR and a revenue point of view.

They're a business, first and foremost. You can bet that if they didn't find it profitable to do the first two times, they're not going to do it a third time.

Here's an alternative scenario though it is bound to be an unpopular one: What if, the last time they did it, it was not the end of the world. What if they actually saw massive reduction in piracy, and a minor uptick in sales over what they expected? Sure, they patched it later - but if all they wanted to do was prevent the initial wave of piracy, t

Unfortunately, I think your right. They probably also believe this game will be popular enough to pull some people over the fence. The "uninformed parents buying their kids a game" source of revenue is going to stave off boycotts to a certain degree. Tempting enough informed people to bite the bullet is all they need to get over the hump. Unfortunately for UbiStupid, Driver isn't that good of a game.

How does this hurt them more ? The way I see it, it hurts them even less.If nobody buys the game AND nobody pirates it, this is a statement. It's a message that says:"Your DRM sucks and we won't give you our money until you remove it". Otherwise, if too many people pirates the game, it only justifies their use of DRM and may even be used as arguments by lobbyists to have new harsher laws against piracy or ask for government money.

They return to using the same harebrained DRM scheme, we return to boycotting it. Why does UBI think it will be different this time? That we somehow magically now accept that kind of crap? If anything, the people who got burned by their previous attempt at it will now be wary and also abstain.

Sorry, but if the maker of a game I want to play requires me to be connected to his server all the time just to play it, I will not accept this deal. It pretty much means that this maker will dictate for how long and under what circumstances I may play the game. He can change the rules later and impose even more drastic control over it and I could not do anything about it. He could turn off the server and I doubt I'd get my money back if he does. Essentially, I pay for the game, but the control over how, when and if I play it remains in the hands of the entity who sold it to me.

The console "look and feel" due to more and more games being nothing but cheap ports after being developed for a console is a problem, agreed. But invasive DRM is not the answer. We won't get better games just 'cause DRM will keep the PC gaming platform alive. They will still do cheap ports without adjusting for the different controls and stack the DRM on top of it. But it has its advantages. When I saw R.U.S.E., I wanted it. Badly. I saw the DRM and I abstained. By now, I now that it's just a cheap console knockoff and hence I'm pretty glad I didn't waste my money on it. If more games had invasive DRM at release, I would have let a few more slip and wouldn't be angry at me now for buying a game that pretty much requires a console controller to be played sensibly on a PC.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with basic online game architecture, most multiplayer games have something called a "master server" or "control server". Let's take Valve's game for instance - when you hit "Find Servers", the Master Server is rung up and presents a list of all servers that respond. Valve's system pretty much entails all of their games, so we're still able to play fantastic stuff like Team Fortress Classic over a decade after they've come

This is true for some but not all genres. How well would, say, a racing or fighting game work with a mouse and keyboard?

no reason to force controls to gamepad or similar device.

Other than that in multiplayer games, an extra gamepad for players 2, 3, and 4 is far cheaper than an extra PC, extra monitor, extra mouse, extra keyboard, extra copy of Windows, and extra copy of the game. True, some genres (like FPS and RTS) require concealing your position from other players, but not all games are in those genres.

No, they don't.. Word about DRM slowly seems to be seeping out, and people are getting more riled about it across the board.It's more like "They think the anti-DRM rally will get smaller each time, but in reality, it could more easily get louder and stronger".

Take a friend of mine. An average Joe Gamer. No computer background whatsoever. One of the "I wanna play the game and not tinker with it or figure 10 things out before I get to play" people. He didn't know about DRM. Until one of the games he bought experienced "crashes" for no reason. Well, no reason other than the connection to the controlling server failed. Now I get a call every time he wants a new game and the first question is "will it work or will it be the same shit?".

Previous DRM was consumer friendly but was largely ineffective at preventing piracy, which is why companies have resulted in taking more extreme DRM measures.

As Internet connections are becoming faster and more reliable and Ubisoft works out the bugs, less PC users will notice less and less of the DRM. The average Joe Gamer is probably just going to get the console version anyways so the effects on that demographic could be overstated.

There are obvious risks of negative PR and pissing off legitimate custom

These are all examples where the game originally worked. Which wasn't the case with UBI's "have to connect to play" scheme which failed miserably when it was first introduced, with people unable to play for days.

And while gamers accept things like privacy invasion and having to do without user maps and DLC, and while they may accept that servers will be turned off eventually, especially if they're not interested in playing a game longer than for maybe a year, what they DO care about is whether the game work

Gradually things got sorted out, internet connections got faster, valve got more capacity online and the early problems were forgotten. Nowadays most new games requires online activation of some form and you see many people here singing steams praises.

Yup, last week i contemplated picking up assasins creed 2 (used even, to not directly send money to ubi) or 3, because i really enjoyed AC1 (and supposedly, 2 and 3 have more free gameplay), but the always on DRM shit pretty much pushed me back to not buying it, this news once again strenghtened my resolve.

I have to little time to even play 0.01% of worthwhile games anyway, so cutting out ubisoft doesnt really hurt anyway, fuck those guys with their DRM

Yes, there are people wanting it for free, but there is a growing number of people who pirate it just to get away from the DRM.

There will always be people out there that want it for free. Even if the price is reasonable they still want it for free. Those people are not your customers and they never will be. It's good to see that a lot of people are voting with their wallets here. Always on drm wouldn't be as big a deal if it's an online game but it still degrades your computer's performance.

There will always be people out there that want it for free. Even if the price is reasonable they still want it for free. Those people are not your customers and they never will be.

The questions are

1: how many people are there who want it for free but will pay for it if they can't pirate it in a timely manner2: how many people who will either boycott it completely or wait for it to be in the "bargin bin" before buying because of the DRM.3: how many people who would have waited and bought it used would buy it new if DRM is used to cut off used sales

There will always be people out there that want it for free. Even if the price is reasonable they still want it for free. Those people are not your customers and they never will be. It's good to see that a lot of people are voting with their wallets here. Always on drm wouldn't be as big a deal if it's an online game but it still degrades your computer's performance.

Most people will want it for free. It is basic economics.

The DRM is targeted towards people who want the game for free, but will are willing to pay for it if there is no free option.

well, that game just went on my "download a pirate copy, just because" list.

I just realize that this has been a trend for me for years now. If I read "DRM free", I feel zero inclination to go on btjunkie - either I like it and buy it or I don't and don't. But the more DRM there is in the crap, the more I'm inclined to most definitely not give them my money.

Too bad we're not in the majority. Just imagine if putting DRM on your game were a surefire way of having close to zero sales, but being on the top of the torrent lists. The whole thing would disappear so quickly, we'd wonder if it was all just a dream.

This is why I don't understand DRM these days. DRM doesn't stop pirates. Pirates never have to deal with DRM, and even this advanced form Ubisoft is throwing around has been rendered useless in previous games infected by it. All this sort of thing seems to discourage is actually purchasing the game at all.

The TSA will like this. "To prove you are not a terrorist, you must be constantly connected to our Trusted Citizen network. If you lose your connection, then you lose your trusted status and will be treated like the terrorist you have become until we clear you again."

Yeah. For top athletes, something like that already happens, pro prevent doping abuse. Now athletes get banned not because they used doping, but just because they couldn't get online, the website didn't work, or they forgot.

The TSA will like this. "To prove you are not a terrorist, you must be constantly connected to our Trusted Citizen network. If you lose your connection, then you lose your trusted status and will be treated like the terrorist you have become until we clear you again."

It used to be that the game Paranoia was fun because it was so outrageous. Now it's more of a documentary.

I'm already getting a refund for an Ubi game that has that DRM (The Settlers 7). They tried to push me back to Steam for a refund, but I pointed them to their own EULA, where it says you can get a refund if you don't agree to the DRM and the retarded Ubi launcher, and they're handling it.

No game is so good, interesting, or important to my life that I'd be willing to submit to this always on DRM.

But I do boycott overbearing DRM schemes. Seriously, this serves nobody's interest at all. It's now more difficult for me to even *look* at buying your games because I have to check if it has junk like this attached to it. So when it comes to purchasing decisions, if I see "Ubisoft" I have to expend more effort to check the product first before I buy it. That means that unless it's something fabulous, the chances are I just won't bother, and the name Ubisoft will put me off everything (it's already starting to now!).

And this time next year Ubisoft will be saying that sales of game X slumped because of completely unverifiable piracy when in fact it was just people annoyed with either previous or new purchases that have shite like that and either pirate or stop buying that and other, completely unrelated, products from Ubisoft.

Not everyone has a perfectly stable Internet connection, not everyone has a perfectly stable wireless connection, not everybody wants their PC constantly communicating online and taking up bandwidth for no good reason (how small the bandwidth is is irrelevant - it's more than it should be and adds up if every game were to go this route, you play a lot, and you have low bandwidth caps in the nation you're in). Just someone uploading photos as you try to do something can kill the average ADSL connection, now it means the game pause/saves/quits.

The people who don't have that stuff will be buying single-player games or games with lots of single-player content and still you force a completely ridiculous requirement on them.

A reliance on a constantly-available Internet connection to a third-party server in order to play a game is ridiculous. Hell, I might as well VNC into a damn computer on the other side of the world and play that way, there's little difference in practical terms between that and this DRM. Connection lost? Bye-bye game, or at best constant pauses and saves because it thinks it's gone.

In work, I have literally told companies to get lost after they tell me that the new iteration of their software is an online-only, access over the Internet, lose your session if it dies, affair. It's not that it won't work most of the time, but the point is that we lose control over when it does work. If local software dies, I can restore an image, or rebuild a machine, or do something to get it back and working. If remote software dies, we just have to twiddle our thumbs until their support line frees up.

It's a ridiculous thing and solves no problem that exists. Pirates will crack round it in days. Consumers don't have any problems without it but have massive ones with it. And console versions OF THE SAME GAME don't have that stupid requirement, despite consoles being online nowadays.

I loved the original Driver. The series got a bit lost after that but I was actually eyeing this up on Steam with the intent to buy it. Saw a thread on the steam forums pointing to those same articles, read them, saw the Twitter comment from Ubisoft itself and instantly removed it from my wishlist. My life is too short for that shit, my gaming time is gaming time, not tech support time. Ubisoft has forgotten that they are providing entertainment - that means "get everything out of my way because I want to have fun". Strangely, I don't want to be diagnosing my wireless/Internet in the middle of a game session, and will just choose a game that doesn't require that.

P.S. The game also doesn't support steering wheel controllers. A driving game. Seriously.

Bill is not my favorite guy ever, but that was a well crafted flame. Made even better by the fact that it aimed at his own managers. In the long run it never really accomplished much, but you could see the light bulb going off as he realized what his customers had to go through when they had problems.

We don't want to keep wasting all those resources developing for the PC. We're going to make DRM on the PC a complete piece of shit situation. Nobody is buying the game on the PC, now. PC gaming is dying. We can't make money on the PC. We're only making titles for consoles, now.

Many of the people I knew that bought the previous games with this DRM were not aware of it. Now after being burned once, their awareness of DRM has been raised. They won't get as many unsuspecting customers this time.

We're going about this the wrong way. We should all buy copies of the game and then return it the next day because it won't play without the internet. That will cost Ubisoft thousand of dollars handling returns / RMA's from their various vendors and send a clear message about the DRM.

Since this kind of DRM prevents the work from entering the public domain after a fixed amount of time... (ya know, the actual exchange brokered between the people and copyright holders), works with this kind of DRM have no valid copyright. There is zero moral disincentive against pirating it, cracking it, spreading it far and wide, and even repackaging the cracked version and selling it.

Of course, issues like this are decided not by the actual text of the laws, nor by the background intention of the laws,

To send Ubisoft the clearest possible message, I feel that a four-tiered approach needs to happen:

1.) Don't buy the game, and tell all your friends not to buy the game, even the console versions.2.) Buy the game, but return it three weeks later, unopened. The logic: Best Buy and Gamestop will have replenished their inventory after three weeks; they'll be none too thrilled with having twice that inventory taking up shelf space and will be pressuring Ubisoft's distributor to curtail production runs.3.) Commen

So what your saying is that DRM is a complete waste of money anyway - because DRM or not, it will get pirated. And with DRM, the chances of someone pirating it are higher because they want to avoid this sort of crap even if they are a legitimate customer. So why bother with it at all?

I've yet to see an effective DRM scheme. In fact, I can't even name a title that got cracked/pirated AFTER it was out in stores - the only news stories I've ever seen were "Unreleased game X on pirate sites already".

There is a very large amount of rose color in your glasses, or the you've just gotten unlucky. Speaking in broad terms, crime is lower now in the US (and in most major metro areas) than it was 25 years ago when I was a kid (God that statement makes me feel old). Now, of course that doesn't mean that crime is lower in any one particular town, or that the town you live in now doesn't have more crime than the one you grew up in despite similar size, but broadly speaking the country is a safer place than it w

Seriously, the only proper solution here is to boycott the game and NOT pirate it. period. Am I the only one who understands that this is the only reasonable solution?

No, you're not the only one. To this day I haven't played a single second of (as one example of many) Bioshock. Didn't buy the game, didn't pirate it, just ignored it.The same holds true for every other game that contains DRM. Didn't buy, didn't pirate. Only DRM-free games run on my system.